"They were texts of happiness (although they tell of despair) and they provided happiness to their readers....love is the most interesting of narratives... with a vast and monotonous empire of feelings...that of desire, society and morality....and when desire goes against social order, the solution is usually moralizing: death or a moral fall. Its model of happiness is moderate and rests on two convictions:...happiness is at hand...via marriage and the family and secondly, that the world does not necessarily have to change so that men and women can be happy." (p. 11)

"Read by a popular audience...they competed with other forms of culture, theater, song, film. They are just a vast chapter of a literary culture....articulated in a wider sense of culture." (p 151)

"It deals, undoubtedly...with an aesthetic without problems..... Security is one of its most important qualities..." (152)

"The weekly narratives presented to their readers a desired world, designing an ideal horizon devoid of every day difficulties or obstacles." (p. 154)